In Defense of Open Source Free-riders

by Ben Pearson

February 25th, 2015

Cassidy James, the founder of Elementary OS, a popular Linux distribution, recently came under fire after suggesting that users who downloaded their software without paying were “cheating” the system. He has since retracted those words, but the implications of this statement are still being discussed. Open source is built on the concept that anyone can take the source code and do whatever they want with it freely, and this methodology has always attracted a considerable amount of users that don’t pay for the software they use. Elementary OS itself, benefits from being able to use the Linux distributions it is built from freely, and while at first glance these people might seem to detract from a project’s success, it seems that free-riders might be an integral part of successful open source projects.